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Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet: Cowards, betrayers and appeasers have destroyed the NHS

All three parties have colluded in the creation of ideal conditions for an unprecedented colonisation of the NHS by an aggressive, profit-seeking private sector. NHS SOS, a new book edited by Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis, explains how it was done.

NHS SOS: How the NHS Was Betrayed and How We Can Save It
Edited by Jacky Davis and Raymond TallisOneworld, 288pp, £8.99

Andy Burnham, the shadow secretary of state for health, tells a revealing story about his last days in the Department of Health, back in May 2010. As Burnham was saying his goodbyes to civil servants in Richmond House, David Nicholson, the fierce chief executive of the National Health Service, warned that if he returned after the election, his priority would have to be efficiency – achieving a better NHS with less money. A financially fragile health service could tolerate no more reorganisations.

When, just two months after the election, Burnham read Andrew Lansley’s extra - ordinary white paper Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS, he was dumbstruck. A huge top-down reorganisation was being proposed, despite what he knew to be the department’s view that such changes were unwanted and unsustainable. Something seemed to have gone very wrong at the heart of government.

What we now know – and what Jacky Davis’s and Raymond Tallis’s new book, NHS SOS, so lucidly describes – is that a very British coup had taken place. During the run-up to the election, the Conservative Party had claimed that there would be “no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS”. Despite this, Lansley soon infiltrated the Department of Health, ignored the advice of his most senior civil servants and implanted his carefully constructed plan to end more than 60 years of consensus that it was the duty of the secretary of state to provide a comprehensive, continuous and equitable health service that was free at the point of use.

Lansley set about a major – indeed, revolutionary – reversal. Like many coups, this did not result in immediate victory but it started a civil war within the NHS that today threatens to create further crises, providing justi - fication for even more destructive reforms in the future.

Conservatives have an honourable philosophy that unites them and that seems to make some intuitive sense. They argue that competition is by far the best way to solve society’s ailments. Competition certainly works in sorting out the best football teams from the worst. In business, competitive instincts can sharpen minds to create new products that transform important aspects of our lives. It would be entirely natural to think that competition among health providers would enhance the quality of our NHS. The problem for the Conservatives is that there is not one shred of reliable evidence to prove that competition improves health. On the contrary, we know only too well that creating competitive markets in health is extremely harmful.

The US has the most advanced marketbased health system in the world. There, competition has driven up costs, created enormous variations in the quality of services available and fuelled distortions and disparities that make the idea of equity a pipe dream. Despite this, Conservatives, ably and surprisingly supported by their Liberal Democrat partners, have succeeded in creating conditions for the unprecedented colonisation of the NHS by an aggressive, profitseeking private sector. For these reasons, it is a simple, although appalling, truth that the Health and Social Care Act 2012 marked the end of the NHS.

NHS SOS explains how it was lost. It is a painful story and one that we must confront if we are to have any hope of reclaiming what was once ours. There were three catastrophic failures. The first great error was made by the Labour Party. As Tallis argues, “Labour was most culpable.” It was a suc - cession of Labour ministers, led by Alan Milburn and Patricia Hewitt, who prepared the NHS for privatisation. Having betrayed their visionary Labour forebears, many of them went on to line their pockets with well-paid consultancies in the private sector that they had done so much to foster.

The second failure lay with the media and especially with the BBC. Journalists consistently failed to ask questions about who would profit from Lansley’s reforms. They failed to explain the conflicts of interest staining so many of those designing his plans (from management consultants such as McKinsey to “think tanks” such as the King’s Fund). And they failed to point out that Lansley’s bill would dissolve the vital link between the secretary of state and his duty to provide care.

Perhaps the most atrocious betrayal of all came from an unexpected quarter – the medical profession. The British Medical Association pursued a policy of appeasement, which rendered it guilty of a crime of quite astonishing proportions: the death of a health system that had led the world in proving that a universal right to health could also be a universal symbol of our respect – and responsibility – for one another.

The Royal Colleges preferred to fight their own internecine wars rather than unite in opposition to a government that they each privately detested. The most senior medical leaders within government – notably the chief medical officer – chose to remain silent. The authors of NHS SOS use words such as “feeble” and “dismal” to describe their medical colleagues. They are too kind.

Tallis writes, “There is room for hope.” Maybe. Labour must unequivocally commit to repealing the Health and Social Care Act 2012. Campaigns must be launched, political pressure applied, evidence of harm gathered, so-called leaders held to account. Most of all, we need “an urgent inquest into the abysmal failure of professional leadership” within medicine.

What we have learned from the past decade is this: Labour, yes Labour, initiated a process that eventually erased an institution that had become a beacon of advanced democracy. The Conservatives happily used Labour’s perversions to accelerate this destruction. And the Liberal Democrats? They colluded and connived. If there is a hell, I look forward to the day when I meet these cowards, betrayers and appeasers – burning in obloquy.

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.